In August, AssetFuture’s Matthew Sleaford presented at the Asset Management Council’s Tuesday Webinar on Joining the Dots from IoT to SAMP. Many of the attendees asked for more detail on getting started on the journey, so we’ve summarised the beginning of the presentation for context, and detailed the three steps for getting started.
You can view the full presentation here
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been around longer than many people realise. The first example is thought to be in the 1980s, when three US college students connected a sensory board to a vending machine to remotely monitor the temperature of its beverages.
Today, temperature monitoring and control is an increasingly common technology in private homes and commercial premises. Every person walking around with a mobile device is part of this IoT network; consider how phones have been used to track movement in the COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian government is already planning to use this kind of data to measure pedestrian and vehicle movements in real-time, to make better decisions about urban planning.
For asset management, the challenge is not simply in collecting data, but getting value from it in the form of insights. The highest form of value would be to join the dots between organisational objectives and asset management objectives.
As an example, one company detected there were higher levels of CO2 in the morning, which can lead to drowsiness and inefficiency, and potentially risk. Using IoT and the data they had begun to collect, they found out that the building cleaners were turning on gas heaters to make the room more comfortable for staff, inadvertently increasing CO2 levels. This was a highly valuable learning and, fortunately, a simple issue to fix.
One of the values of IoT and data is revealing things you didn't understand or didn't even know were there. We’ve found from working with our customers that sometimes insights from IoT confirm the hunches that they have, and sometimes they disprove them. At other times it points to areas that weren't even on the radar. That's the true power of data: discovering the undiscovered.
So, how can you harness this power for your organisation and get started on your own IoT journey?
1. Create a data management plan
Creating a data management plan is about having a mindset that values data and views it as a valuable, even "sacred" asset. You first need ownership; someone who has oversight and management of a plan. That person needs to be able to take input from stakeholders, and design a data management plan that specifies the business drivers to get buy-in across the board.
The plan needs to drive consistency, such as having a structured hierarchy or location data, condition values and so on, in a standardised framework. This consistency is vitally important. If you say that a critical asset is in "condition five" everybody needs to know what "critical" and "condition five" mean. If people are using their own interpretations and inputting their own thought processes, you're going to end up with a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ scenario. This is not uncommon, but it really is highly undesirable. It’s harder to do than it is to prevent.
2. Centralise existing data
The second step is to centralise existing data, which is actually one of the hardest and most time-consuming steps. You’ve probably got data all over the place at the moment in your current workspace. Centralising it is very likely to be a manual process in the beginning. As new data is gathered and existing data is cleaned up, you may realise that there are gaps in the data, so you have to enrich that data with complementary information.
You probably also still have paper-based information that needs to be digitised. Some assets might not be networked, so you know you have to add some asset tags, barcodes or QR codes for easier scanning with mobile devices. Ultimately, this process will become automated, or should become automated. If not, part of your business process should be to drive that consistency across the business once again.
Ultimately, new devices should have identification information embedded in them, helping you keep up-to-date by the OEM service provider, as well as keeping the asset management register up-to-date. Those devices will then be able to autonomously push data to your asset management platform.
3. Maintain data as a valuable asset
Lastly, step three is maintaining the data as a valuable asset. Buildings and infrastructure are rightly regarded as highly valuable assets. They’re treated - or should be treated - with scrupulous attention to what happens across their usable life. Whereas, for some reason, the data about these assets is often treated haphazardly, despite its high value. In businesses with large and often geographically diverse teams, ownership of this data can fall into silos and into multiple business units, and that consistency can fall by the wayside.
A lack of a holistic view can lead to issues falling through the cracks, which in turn reduces the value of the data to the business, while also increasing risk. So you have to ask yourself: why is the data is not treated as a valuable asset in and of itself? Ultimately, this data does degrade, in the same way the facilities that the data is about degrade. And, unfortunately, this data degrades much more rapidly than the building, so you really do need to stay on top of it.
Valuable data is a valuable asset. You then have to consider the ownership of that data. Who retains it from a cost decision perspective?
This a new concept for many businesses, and they will need to be led through it. There are many use-cases and scenarios out there, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just make sure you go iteratively: "fail fast, fail forward" as they say in the innovation space. Don’t be afraid of failure, of what’s "under the covers". Just take the data, find the information, and take the best path that you can.